The author discusses the process of nationalizing literature, that is, the formation of a national literary canon in Slovene poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism. The utopian projection and formation of a "Slovenised" literary system has been intertwined with the successful establishment of a unified Slovene literary language. The use of images of Parnassus and Elysium, these topoi in the European cultural memory, was one ofthe self-regulatory strategies acquired by Slovene writers to mark the distinction between their own discourse and the norms of the "classics" and a competitive comparison with other modern national literatures in order to achieve integration into the canon of "world literature".